Gris looks just so beautiful, but just so empty

I am so torn by the huge stretch of Gris that I’ve played. Vastly more than we’d usually expect from a preview, given to us peculiarly close to its 13th December release. I’ve seen an awful lot of this enemy-less platformer, and yet I still can’t tell whether it’s beautiful enough to forgive all else, or just too dull to excuse. Gris an exquisitely beautiful game, in which far too much of your time is spent just pushing an analogue stick to the right. And let me not undersell just how beautiful. The animations in this are wondrous, balletic, often breathtaking. I’m just constantly delighted by them, even those of the main character, Gris, which I’ve seen hundreds of times over are still a treat each time. When you stumble upon a dell of little animated creatures it’s glee-inducing. When you see a swirling cloud form itself into a creature the malevolence is deeply evocative. If Gris is nothing else, it is one of the most sumptuously beautiful 2D games I’ve ever played. Oftentimes as I’m playing this build a month away from release, it feels like enough. And then it makes me run inexorably to the right or left again, while almost nothing happens for an unbelievably long time, ending in its grabbing the controls away from me to do an interesting bit for itself. And I want to yell. The core of the game is about exploring an ever-expanding amount of its ever-changing world from a central hub,… [Read full story]